Humans exert enormous selective pressures on certain organisms, essentially transforming constituents of the natural world to suit the needs of society. The decorative arrangements and stylized environments that typify the prints in Oryza acknowledge this history of control and manipulation, while employing the aesthetic language of botanical illustration and situating the project within a larger discourse about labor, whether in the studio, the laboratory, or the field.
The prints in Oryza grew from a collaborative partnership with a plant geneticist at Marquette University, Dr. Michael Shläppi, who is developing a variety of early-flowering / cold-tolerant rice to be grown in Wisconsin. Oryza sativa, domesticated Asian rice, is a staple crop that alone supplies over 20% of the calories that humans consume worldwide. Rice, like other cereal grains, is a grass; its domestication produced plants that retain their seeds through the end of the season, making the harvest of the grain economical. Over millennia, varieties have been cultivated for myriad purposes; however, rice remains a labor-intensive crop, and much of its industrial production takes place in regions of the world where labor costs are negligible.
In Oryza, silhouettes of fieldworkers drawn from historical sources populate the works. Their shadowy forms move through the rice fields, performing the tasks of cultivation, but the people remain indistinct. Illustrations of genetically modified rice capture the growth of the plant, while patterned backgrounds depict conditions necessary for farming and reference ongoing modifications and improvements to the organism. The historical intersections of art, science, and agriculture persist within the topic of rice, a crop whose cultivation and consumption define the lives of billions of people throughout the world.
Sprout
2017, lithograph, screenprint, foil, graphite, 20″ x 16″
Transplant
2017, lithograph, screenprint, foil, graphite, 20″ x 16″
Seasons
2017, lithograph, screenprint, foil, graphite, 20″ x 16″
Rice Blossom
2017, lithograph, screenprint, foil, graphite, 20″ x 16″
Harvest
2017, lithograph, screenprint, foil, graphite, 20″ x 16″
Planting (after Angelo Morbelli)
2017, woodcut, screenprint, letterpress, collage, 17″ x 11″
Equilibrium (after Hokusai)
2017, woodcut, screenprint, graphite, collage, 17″ x 11″
Night (after Camille Pissarro)
2017, woodcut, screenprint, graphite, collage, 17″ x 11″
A Single Grain (after Camille Pissarro)
2017, woodcut, screenprint, lithograph, collage, 17″ x 11″
Autumn (after Jean-François Millet)
2017, woodcut, screenprint, graphite, collage, 17″ x 11″